Metamorphosis 6: 401-674: A Paraphrase in Still Pictures

By

Annick MacAskill

Philomela

The tongue is lost—now blood poolsin her mouth. Her maid stops the woundwith a tampon, split down the middlelike some carpenter’s unlucky thumb.Splinter-mouthed, the girl wears the griefthat is her mother’s heritage. Shetakes the thread—she knowswhat she hunts—she tricks andstrains, counterfeiting timeinto a skein of slapdash resistance:one purple gallinule against a pale sky. She did not think she would knowthis death in life. In darkness, she dreamsof rebirth, her father’s country—the sandy shores against versionsof white and blue. She crosses her handsand waits.

Procne

Feeling is not an option:her rage is mythical, biblical,canonical, in shades of roses but notpretty, she stands in a parking lotunder the ductile moon— the arid sky, her arid heart—drinking Red Bull and vodka,unflinching at the flames they castabout her throat, her chest, lungsready for anything, even this.She casts her gaze about, squeezesthe woven missive in her hand. Whenshe takes the crowbar to the windowof a stranger’s sleeping car,all she can see is her husband’s skull,its shape like a bird’s perfect egg. His nameis still on the display screen of the cellphoneshe left on their nightstand, its existenceconfirmed in flashing light. She brushestwo frayed wires together,makes fire, then drives.

Philomela

She is complicitbut only to the night, to her sister,who holds her as she shivers, a field rabbit quaking before a packof cats, their talons, their glaresharpening. At first her eyes are heavybefore his wife: she could have wornsomething different or refusedthe wine he offered. For a moment,she wishes she could go awaylike wind, disappear quick andviolent. She wraps her armsaround her sister, who bellowstheir rage, their cabal into the hollow forest behind their motel room.

Tereus

It’s strange to think—the man looks out at the same night,the same sky, the same moon. A blackcurtain spotted with white dusthugs his shoulders as it hugshis wife’s shoulders, her sister’s, too. Itcovers them all, buries them in secretsand plotting. Here on in, everythingwill have to be reconstructed, unfoldedand moved back to significance. There is no timeto wonder at the meaning of guiltwhen you are the guilty. There is no time.

Itys

When you find him you could almostdismiss the whole affair, so lightis his body: it could be madeof straw or cottonballs, his skulla crab apple you could finishunder one heavy boot. Fatherknew the revenge that would tearat Mother’s heart, dropped the treacherous offspringinto an overflowing bathtub. Fatherknows the newspapers, the history books,the poets, too, will preserve him; faithful,they will ruin the harridans, too.The boy released his lifemore quickly than it came to him— whatever you might hear,he was no one’s afterthought.

Swallows

When they stretch their wings and dropthey are lifted—feathered machines, their bodies steel widgetsgaudy with colour against the monochromeof the sky. They make sounds like musicand mourning, as if remembering somethingthat everyone should hear. When you listen,you could almost see it, the bloodshed, two kingdomsfelled and no child support to pay,visits in prisons where orange chairsdaub the muck of the everyday—all this a cinema in crimson behind your eyelids,and the bodies with nowhere left to go,gestures towards freedom stilledlike bones angled in tree resin.

Annick MacAskill's poetry has appeared in journals including Room, CV2, The Fiddlehead, Arc, The Puritan, and Lemon Hound. Other poems have been longlisted for the CBC's Canada Writes Poetry Prize. She lives and writes in Kitchener, and is the author of the chapbook Brotherly Love: Poems of Sappho and Charaxos (Frog Hollow Press, 2016). This poem originally appeared in Room issue 39.3 and has been republished here as part of the No Comment project.